Young barrister Michael Cantrip has skipped off to the Channel Islands to take on a tax law case that's worth a fortune - if his tax-planning chums can locate the missing heir. But Cantrip has waded in over his head. Strange things are happening on these mysterious islands.

Appearance and reality are not always the same. Timothy Kinnit is rich, handsome and well-bred. He seems to have everything. Then, on the eve of his elopement, he learns that he was adopted, and he is desperate to know who he really is. Someone seems no less keen to stop him finding out.

Detective, Albert Campion goes into the eccentric Palinode household, where there have been two suspicious deaths. And, if poisoning were not enough, there are also anonymous letters, sudden violence and a vanishing coffin. Meanwhile, the Palinodes go about their nocturnal business and Campion dices with danger in his efforts to find the truth.

Campion is welcomed back from his three-year stint with the war office by a suspicious suicide case -- classic British crime writing at its best.

When Albert Campion is called by the fiancee of an old college friend to investigate the disappearance of her uncle, he little expects the mysterious spate of death and dangers that follows among the bizarre inhabitants of Socrates Close, Cambridge. He and Stanislaus Oates must tread carefully, and battle some family dynamics, to solve the case.

A British claim to a tiny Balkan state leads Campion on a race against time in the village of Pontisbright -- classic British crime writing at its best.